Generally, a component mounting apparatus is configured in such a way as to carry a printed circuit board to be mounted using a transfer belt, position the printed circuit board by moving a component mounting section in X and Y directions, pick up components supplied by a component supply section using suction nozzles attached to a mounting head and mount the components on the positioned printed circuit board.
When components are mounted on a printed circuit board, in order to shorten a total time of mounting the components, the electronic components to be mounted are separated into a plurality of component groups according to the sizes, weights and mounting positions of the components supplied, and their mounting order is optimized before the components are mounted. This is because when the components to be mounted are suction-held by suction nozzles and moved to their mounting positions on the printed circuit board, the components may fall off from the suction nozzles if they are big or heavy.
By the way, with reduction in size and weight of electronic devices such as cellular phones and small digital video cameras in recent years, it is necessary to mount components one side of which is smaller than 1 mm with narrow inter-component distances of 0.3 mm or even narrower 0.1 mm, for example.
However, as shown in FIG. 13a, in the case where components are mounted with a narrow inter-component interval a, a component 1a which is already mounted, and a suction nozzle 5 or a component 1b held by the suction nozzle 5 interfere with each other in the vicinity of an arrow C, causing a problem of rendering the mounting of the component 1b defective.
As a solution to such a problem, a method of mounting components using suction nozzles 5 having a smaller diameter as shown in FIG. 13b is proposed. However, such narrow suction nozzles 5 have a problem of failing to keep the nozzle strength and easily getting damaged. Therefore, the diameter of the suction nozzles 5 is required to be at least 4 mm from the standpoint of strength.